Bio:

Description: Tall and muscular as any troll, Di’oq has the look and scars of a twenty-year veteran of countless battles, for good reason. A troll of around forty years, with a keen, quiet stare and much less given to boisterous braggadocio than the standard troll. His teeth do not protrude and his tusks are perfectly intact, but he wears his hair and beard cut short. His skin is greener than most trolls and his brow more swept

Background: “I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of raiding. Its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing for sons, husbands, and fathers. It is only those who have never held a sword, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated, that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”
- Di’oq Flamequencher, final address to the moot.

Barsaive is a violent place. Low-scale endemic warfare stretches from Parlainth to Vivane, from the fastness of the Blood Wood to the shores of Death’s Sea. The Theran Empire’s campaign to re-establish control over its rebel province clashes with the efforts of Thoral and the other Free Cities to remain independent, all while Orcish marauders, Troll skyraiders and T’skrang river pirates ply the air and ground and waterways, and gangs of adventurers seek fortune and glory against monsters, armies, horrors, and one another. Most would-be adventurers throw themselves into the conflicts of Barsaive seeking a means of distinction and glory.

Most, not all.

Glory is a relative thing. Legends are ephemeral, things for theory and the telling of tales. What is not ephemeral is blood, and pain, and the slaughter of the defenseless. Pretensions of honor do not restore the dead rotting in their fields, nor do fine words spoken to multitudes of armed men alter the basic fact that the majority of such multitudes are employed for purposes that have nothing to do with fine words. For every battle wherein one army, company, or brotherhood stands down another and fights for some principle, there are a hundred others consisting of those without swords dying at the hands of those with them. This is a truism that cuts across all races, kingdoms, clans, and philosophies. The primary purpose of armaments is to subject those without them to the arbitrary will of those with. And any soldier both honest and long-lived enough will eventually come to realize this.

Di’oq is both.

In his time he was a raider, a mercenary, a lesser follower of greater captains. A swordsman hired or feared for the reach of his arm and the power of his trollish musculature. He fought for principles he thought good and some he thought less good. He fought for freedom or other high-minded ideals, for fortune and riches, for glory and for the honor of clan and race and other things no longer even held in account. Sometimes he fought men who also fought for such things. Sometimes he fought men who simply wanted to keep what was theirs. And sometimes he fought men he never knew the motivations of. In the end, it didn’t matter. Whatever high-minded purpose was stretched as a veneer over the fighting that was done, the purpose of warfare, ultimately, is itself. Stories of entering into legend, becoming heroes of renown through the act of raiding farms and stealing provisions from those without the steel to keep them, were illusory. The quest for glory devours its own, and permits men to imagine themselves greater than they are. How many soldiers did he meet sitting atop their steeds, soaked head-to-toe in the blood of men they didn’t know, heads or children spitted on their lances, talking excitedly of their “victories” and “honor”, every one of them a paladin? How many times was he that man? In all the years of killing over principles held dearly, how many men were actually ennobled? How much blood was spent to purposes invented after the fact to justify some fresh act of death? Disgust might have turned to rage had he not been neck-deep in the same filth as the rest of those hypocrites he fought alongside. As it was, all he could muster after a point was apathy. Fine words turned to ash, glory to mockery. And all the riches piled high among the bones of the fallen were nothing but the sterile, charmless trinkets that were used to reward those who killed enough defenseless farmers to be accounted “great”. His separation from moot and clan was ultimately inevitable. The coin they had to pay for his continued presence became so devalued in his eyes as to constitute an insult. When the end finally came, he did not even bother to curse them for not seeing the truth of a matter their entire structure was based around not seeing. He just left.

He left not seeking some new purpose, but to be damned to all purposes and their honeyed appeals to the glory and honor of senseless butchery. He left once his innate cynicism would no longer admit yet another ‘cause’ to champion, once all empires and kingdoms and tribes and pirate clans all began to look the same, he simply left. And sought the solitude of misanthropy and the wilderness. He killed some, and did not kill others, acting according to whim and personal feelings, and did not seek to lay codes and principles and questions of discussion atop his actions, for all such questions were dishonest in his mind. Some sought to hire him and some to curse him, and he could not have cared less for the pretensions of either. Heroism itself was a lie. And those who clung the tightest to it were those who embodied it the least. What he sought instead was simplicity. Of the wilderness and survival, of beasts and predators and prey, who did not couch their violence in high-minded principle, but killed or did not kill such that they might live, or from instinct so-long bred into them as to constitute the natural workings of the world. There was no nobility in the wilderness, no honor or glory or legend or purity of innocence, but at least there was honesty. And the rest of the world did not even have that.